Most people have experienced SEO even if they couldn't put it into words or recite what the acronym stands for. Search Engine Optimization is a fancy name for having content on your website that makes it show up in search results pertinent to your business. 

To put it simply, SEO, or search engine optimization, matters. The competition is doing it, and you need to be doing it too if you want to keep your competitive edge. Here are three ways you can leverage your competition to learn more about SEO. 

Search engines (SE) are mobsters. SEs send out spies or “crawlers” on to your website to speed read through all of your content, specifically focusing on keywords. When the crawlers have read everything on your website they tell the SE everything they found and the SE indexes it. Once the content is indexed when users search for keywords the SE finds all the relevant pages and then picks out what it thinks are the best ones to show first. SEs, crawlers, and people are lazy, they all want content to be easy to find.

In order to please the mobsters and the crawlers, websites need to have a good Search Engine Optimization (SEO). To make the SEO as high as possible you want to make your site easy for the crawlers to read through, which is built on the structure of your website.

Are You following? No? Ok, let’s sum it up.

If you think that social media is not a tool your business should be using, think again. Here are some very real, very big statistics from Search Engine Journal:

• 87% of small businesses claim that social media has helped their business.
• 85% of business-decision makers believe that at least having one social media channel is very important for technology purchase decisions.
• 40% of small businesses feel that social media helped with their word-of-mouth referrals.

"How can I rank number 1 on Google?"

This is a question I hear 99 percent of the time when working on website design projects. Ranking number 1 in a search result is the holy grail of every marketer and business owner. While there's no sure thing to accomplish this, there are things you can do to improve your overall ranking in a search engine like Google or Bing. 

 Have you ever pulled up a web site that made you want to pull your hair out? Or that web site that is a never-ending maze of pages and you can never seem to get back to where you came from? Maybe you can't even find a simple phone number or an address? We've all been on that web site. It sucks, it's bad for you as a visitor, but it's so much worse for the business. Your website is most often a customer's first impression of your business, and if it is a nightmare you're going to lose leads... forever! Well maybe not forever...

Easy Ways to Optimize Your Website

When you're searching the web for a "restaurant", you expect to see a list of restaurants in the search results. Google displays these websites as a result of it "crawling" millions of websites to display relevant information to help you with your search. Did you know this process is done through what is called a "spider" (also known as a "bot")? No, not actual spiders are crawling your site -- just maybe on your desk! Smack. 

The real question is how do you get search engines to find your site when it's crawling for relevant information? Follow these simple web tricks for SEO (search engine optimization) to help increase the chances of your site being found online.

Think back to when you first launched your website. You were so proud to have it up and now what is your site doing for you? Has it been a year or more since you've done anything on your site? Here are some things you can do to keep your website current.

Have you noticed your website ranking slip on Google? Is your website not showing up like it use to? Has the competition passed you up? It's okay, take a breath, you can fix this.